Memeorandum

December 31, 2013

Following a belated booth review Peyton Manning may lose the single season passing yardage record he seemed to have claimed in the first half of the Bronco's season finale:

(CBS) When the dust settled in the NFL landscape on Sunday, Peyton Manning appeared to have eclipsed Drew Brees’ 2011 passing record.

Manning completed 25-of-28 passes for 266 yards, good for 5,477 yards on the season – one more than Brees’ record. But the NFL is now reviewing a 7-yard completion to Eric Decker with just over a minute remaining in the first quarter.

According to a report from ESPN, one camera angle implies the pass to Decker is a lateral, which would make it a running play. Another angle, however, shows Decker catching the ball at the Broncos’ 48-yard line, with Manning slightly deeper than that.

If the play stands, Manning keeps his record. If the NFL determines the play was in fact a lateral, Manning would finish with 5,470 yards, which would be the second-highest season total in league history.

Left unmentioned: Manning was benched for the second half (along with other starters); I strongly suspect that he would have been on the field if the coaches thought the record was not in the bag. After all, that sort of record is a team achievement and fun for the fans to talk about.

That said, if Manning gets his second Super Bowl ring the passing record will be but a speck of icing on the cake. And if the Broncos don't win the Super Bowl after the season they had, well, that passing record won't mean anything. I guess we could ask Tom Brady of the 2007 18-1 Patriots about that, since the Broncos just broke their scoring and TD passes marks.

First, Happy New Year to all. I began the morning with a bit of a brain teaser which I thought I would share. It's a simple game of Name That Author:

"“Sometime after March 31 — probably not very far after — I would expect the administration to announce that after careful thought, it has decided not to enforce the individual mandate for 2014. As we’ve already seen, the individual mandate is very politically vulnerable. And I suspect we’re not done with the emergency fixes.”

I'll put the link in down in this post but my question is this - am I alone in guessing correctly who wrote that, or are people finding it easy? Critical additional context - it was cited and linked by the InstaPundit.

I ask partly just because, and partly because from time to time the question of whether Bill Ayers wrote, or played a hand in writing, Obama's first book comes up in conversation. My uneducated hunch is that if I can successfully identify the author of a passage such as that above then hi-tech stylometry programs might shed light on the Ayers question (Watts Up With That used JGAAP for a similar exercise). There is a possible New Year's resolution!

December 30, 2013

The race for ten million charity miles to be donated by United Airlines is posed for a dramtic finish. With two days left Rotary International has 234,705 votes. Trailing by a mere 29 votes is the Shriners Hospital with 234,676 votes. They will be counting hanging chads at United!

Meanwhile we are pushing Americares, currently in 10th place with 9,779 votes. The ninth spot is held with 10,578 and eighth with 13,666 so moving up a few notches is possible. Vote here, please. But not more than once per day per electronic device.

Adam Peterson’s life is about to change. For the first time in years, he is planning to do things he could not have imagined. He intends to have surgery to remove his gallbladder, an operation he needs to avoid another trip to the emergency room. And he’s looking forward to running a marathon in mid-January along the California coast without constant anxiety about what might happen if he gets injured.

These plans are possible, says Peterson, who turned 50 this year and co-manages a financial services firm in Champaign, Ill., because of a piece of plastic the size of a credit card that arrived in the mail the other day: a health insurance card.

Peterson is among the millions of uninsured Americans who are benefiting from the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law that launched far-reaching changes to the U.S. health-care system and is President Obama’s premier domestic achievement.

More on Mr. Peterson's new-found peace of mind:

"I get these messages from acquaintances on Facebook saying, ‘Let me keep my doctor,’ ’’ Peterson said. “Well, what about those of us who didn’t have health insurance before? . . . I have been walking a tightrope and have had some twists and falls off of it. To not have to worry about this anymore is a tremendous relief.”

And what are the circumstances that led to this? Staying with the WaPo to the end of the story:

For Adam Peterson, awaiting gallbladder surgery in Illinois, the dark tunnel without insurance began about six years ago, when he decided to forgo health coverage because he needed the cash to set up his financial services business. The cost of that decision hit home in March, when the emergency surgery to remove a gallstone cost him $27,000.

So he set up his own business. Per Manta (and you know I believe everything I read on the internet), his small firm is doing nicely now, although six years ago and through the crash, who can say?

Camargo Investments

A privately held company in Champaign, IL.

Categorized under Financial Planning Consultants, our records show it was established in 2009 and incorporated in Illinois, current estimates show this company has an annual revenue of $1 to 2.5 million and employs a staff of approximately 1 to 4.

Back to the WaPo:

When he went to HealthCare.gov this fall, the online system at first balked at verifying his identity — an essential step. It took a few calls to a help line before anyone called back. But just before Thanksgiving, he managed to enroll in a top-tier plan with a monthly premium of $475.

“I do not feel that it gives me the freedom to do reckless things,” Peterson said, contemplating his insurance coverage, which begins on New Year’s Day. “More, it just allows me to live a normal life with one less worry.”

$475 per month is about $5,700 per year. Per the Kaiser health cost estimator, a silver plan (one notch down from "top-tier") would cost someone in Champaign, IL (ZIP 61820, one non-smoking 50 year old adult, no kids) would cost $4,592 per year without subsidies. Subsidies would kick in for income above $46,000 per year, and we hope this financial consultant is doing that well (although we have no idea what tax jiggling he might be doing; Mickey Kaus says "tax cheats", I say "income managers"; you say 'potato', I say 'Obama').

So is our financial entrepeneur (U of Chicago MBA 1990, per his Facebook page) actually collecting a Federal subsidy? The WaPo is coy on this. However, Mr. Peterson has a blog devoted mainly to chronicling his marathon training and is active on Facebook. [And via Twitter, Mr. Peterson is kind enough to inform me that no, he is not collecting subsidies.]

Per the blog we learn he has been training for marathons since at least 2009, which seems to predate his gall bladder situation. Per basic Googling, we also learn that his state of Illinois established ("IPXP", under another provision of ObamaCare) a high-risk pool for people with a pre-existing conditions problem back in 2010.

Which leaves us scratching our heads at this rhetorical flourish we found at Mr. Peterson's Facebook site, posted last September:

All this discussion about the government shut down around the Affordable Care Act has me thinking that I would like the conservatives to answer a few questions for me. I don't mean to be a downer, but I am 50 years old and do not have health insurance (I am an independent contractor). If I were to purchase insurance on the open market, I could not because I need to have my gall bladder removed (pre-existing condition). Even then, if it was not an issue, health insurance would cost me over $500 per month (unaffordable today, since I am not part of a larger purchasing group). So my dear de-funding friends, let me ask you why (1) you want to deny me affordable health insurance (the "Obamacare exchanges" in Illinois (without any subsidies) will bring my monthly premium in line to about $175 per month because I am finally going to be part of a large purchasing group), (2) you want to exclude me from the insurance market because I have a pre-existing condition that prevents me from buying insurance at all, let alone on an affordable basis, (3) you want me to go bankrupt by having all of my medical issues handled in the emergency room (the most expensive form of healthcare delivery) since I will not have access to preventive care without insurance and (4) you think that REGULATING THE INSURANCE COMPANIES IS ANYTHING CLOSE TO GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF HEALTHCARE.

Dare I answer his questions with a few of my own? First, for six years he has "saved" roughly $5,000 per year by foregoing insurance - that is $30,000. Now his emergency procedure set him back $27,000. Over the six years, that is roughly breaking even (we lack information on deductibles, co-pays and other medical expenses, mercifully). He self insured at about break-even - this is a problem why? I am confident a Chi-town MBA can run those numbers, and probably has.

As to his somewhat recent pre-existing condition, I would hope a financial consultant understands risk management and financial planning. Why should the rest of us pay for his health procedures while he re-invests in his seemingly successful company?

And on that topic, are we in fact directly subsidizing his health insurance? [We are not, as noted above, but if I let new facts interfere with a rant what kind of blog would this be?] Per Facebook $500 a month was unaffordable; per the WaPo, Mr. Peterson went with a top shelf plan at $475 per month. Is he collecting subsidies, or did the $25 per month difference make it affordable? Of course, without info on deductibles and copays premium comparisons are meaningless. That said, the ChiTrib reported that sticker shock, with higher premiums and deductibles, is the Illinois experience under Obamacare.

Well: let me extract his first question and express my bafflement:

(1) you want to deny me affordable health insurance (the "Obamacare exchanges" in Illinois (without any subsidies) will bring my monthly premium in line to about $175 per month because I am finally going to be part of a large purchasing group).

That was posted before the ObamaCare website debuted, so we may simply be observing the power of positive wishful thinking, but... does Mr. Peterson still think his premium will be knocked down to "$175 per month" because he will be "part of a large purchasing group"? Or would it be fair to say that he experienced a bit of sticker shock?

My psychic guess - over the last few years Mr. Peterson was a fitness buff and aging "Young Invincible" who figured it would be cheaper to take his chances rather than buy insurance priced for the frail and sickly. He had his gall bladder problem in March 2013 which washed out his six years of insurance savings and left him with an impending medical bill for gall bladder surgery. He then decided to ride it out until ObamaCare kicked in in 2014 and he could avoid the (probably pricey) IPXP plan designed for those with a pre-existing problem.

So he is happy and the WaPo is happy. But if he is collecting Federal subsidies, well, maybe I am not so happy.

Pressing on with the questions:

(2) you want to exclude me from the insurance market because I have a pre-existing condition that prevents me from buying insurance at all, let alone on an affordable basis...

Well. Defunding the ObamaCare subsidies and altering the restrictions on pre-existing conditions are separate topics. As to what conservatives want, there are different 'repeal and replace' plans out there, and I daresay they all recognize that pre-existing conditions (and asymmetric information) is a conceptual problem for any market for insurance.

However, even if he is not being subsidized by the Feds, Mr. Peterson now wants the insurance companies, and ultimately their customers, to subsidize his choices which worked out badly even though a few years back he was not interested in buying seemingly expensive insurance. If somewhere out there in 2014 is a young, fit man hoping to invest in his own business, why is Mr. Peterson intent on denying him the same choice he made for himself in 2007?

(3) you want me to go bankrupt by having all of my medical issues handled in the emergency room (the most expensive form of healthcare delivery) since I will not have access to preventive care without insurance...

No one wants to bankrupt anyone - this isn't personal, although it is about personal responsiblity. And don't think of this a bankrupting you - think of it as a chance to see the world! Medical tourists in India or Mexico can have a pesky gall bladder plucked for $4,500 to $6,000. Bankrupt a high roller like you? C'mon...

I can quit anytime but will have to stop soon since this is the last question:

(4) you think that REGULATING THE INSURANCE COMPANIES IS ANYTHING CLOSE TO GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF HEALTHCARE.

That's what we think? ALL OF US? That said, once the government is deeply enmeshed in setting standards and reviewing the pricing and reimbursement rates for all the different procedures in the medical world, well, yes, THAT LOOKS A LOT LIKE CONTROL!!!

I know the WaPo will be all over this. Let's close with a photo of our fretful patient; this is from Sept 8 and the caption is reproduced below:

Well, it all started like fun and games morning until the gun went off. 3 hours and 27 minutes, 3,500 calories and 31 miles later, it felt exhausting but was a great accomplishment.

A marathoner turned tri-athlete. Let's all praise ObamaCare for relieving his worries.

OVERLOOKED BY THE WAPO: Don Surber passes along the story of Stephen Eimers, an independent contractor with seven kids. His old plan was disqualified by ObamaCare and despite more than 100 hours of effort Mr. Eimers can't weave through the new website all the way to an insurance card. A snippet:

Since October 1 I have spent over 50 hours navigating that terrible website and over 40 hours on the phone. I was able to complete the application and it was trying to force my children onto Medicaid. I had to make a change in the application that required the Advanced Resolution Center's help. After my initial request I was promised a call back within "48 hours." I'm on day 44 and 6 escalations later!

...

I finally got to the end of the application and noticed the website had changed my answer on filing a tax return from a joint return to not filing a return. I hit the edit button which deleted all my answers. The website then prompted me to answer questions about my dependents but a glitch would not let me do this so after another extended call to the 1-800# I was forced to delete my 2nd completed application. Stupid me decided to try again and I did the whole process and got to the end and the thing glitched again and said we were not filing a return AGAIN. An hour long call to the 1800# and guess what: completed application #3 was DELETED!

I am a true sucker so I tried again this morning. I made it through the application in about 75 minutes and got my eligibility. My wife and I along with our 2 year old son could purchase a policy but our 8,9, 11, 12,14 and 14 year old children would not be able to purchase insurance. Application #4 got deleted. I am done trying!

But we've made the country better for well-off triathletes who've been deferring their medical challenges. Win some, lose some.

OTHER WINNERS!: In the comments AliceH summarizes the other ObamaCare winners storied by the WaPo:

Dan Munstock: 62yo, he's fine. Just wants a checkup. Instead of, you know, going in for a checkup (Ranges $5-$200 depending on where he goes/what is included), he's happily paying $87.57 (after subsidies) for Health Insurance.

Nancy Beigel: 55yo. Now on Medicaid

Amy Torregrossa: 27yo. Used to be covered under her boyfriend's employer insurance (I didn't even know that was possible!), but he changed jobs in July. Neither seem to have attempted to go on COBRA or shop indiv. market. She has pre-existing condition, but apparently found it worth letting coverage slide until October. Now she's on a silver plan for $310/mo.

...an Army officer sent me a letter on rap and other types of music. I wanted to share the final paragraph:

Incidentally, rap is also great music for soldiers. Playing loud rap right before you go outside the wire on a mission kind of puts a little confidence in you, makes you not so terrified. Makes you forget you might be about to die. That’s a precious, precious gift. Fear can cloud your judgment and get you killed. I’m for anything that helps my soldiers remain calm and stay on target.

An alternative take: if that officer is sending Country/Western boys across the wire with the threat of more blaring rap upon their return, death may not seem so unappealing.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has told Vista volunteers and other AmeriCorps workers that their government-provided health coverage does not measure up to the standards of the new health care law, and that they may be subject to financial penalties unless they obtain insurance elsewhere.

...

Mary Strasser, the director of AmeriCorps’ Vista program, described the changes in a bulletin to members on Dec. 16.

The coverage provided by the agency — the AmeriCorps Health Care Benefits Plan — “does not satisfy the individual responsibility requirement of the Affordable Care Act,” which takes effect on Jan. 1, Ms. Strasser said. Accordingly, she said, Vista members may be required to pay a tax penalty if they do not have other coverage and do not receive an exemption.

Vista is a JFK Peace Corps legacy program, so double-ouch. The Times offers a failed metaphor:

Abby Grosslein, a Vista member in New Orleans, said she thought it was strange that the health benefits provided by a federal agency did not meet the standards of a law adopted more than three and a half years ago. “It would be nice if the government waived the penalty because we are a federally funded program,” said Ms. Grosslein, 24, who is completing her third year of service with AmeriCorps. “It’s as if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.”

Well, its as if the left hand doesn't know what the far left hand is doing. In fact, we will probably soon learn that Obama has just found out about this by dint of reading the papers:

Vista, or Volunteers in Service to America, was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, authorized by Congress in 1964 and folded into the AmeriCorps network of programs in 1993. Its members work in education, housing, jobs and social service programs.

President Obama — a onetime community organizer — is a big supporter, and he has called public service “a central cause” of his administration. In March, the White House said that “AmeriCorps may be one of America’s best assets,” transforming communities every day.

WASHINGTON — The United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria.

But some military experts question whether the patchwork response will be sufficient to reverse the sharp downturn in security that already led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis this year, 952 of them Iraqi security force members, according to the United Nations, the highest level of violence since 2008.

The Times reminds us how we reached this parlous state:

The surge in violence stands in sharp contrast to earlier assurances from senior Obama administration officials that Iraq was on the right path, despite the failure of American and Iraqi officials in 2011 to negotiate an agreement for a limited number of United States forces to remain in Iraq.

In a March 2012 speech, Antony J. Blinken, who is currently Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, asserted that “Iraq today is less violent” than “at any time in recent history.”

Mr. Obama has pointed to the American troop withdrawal last year as proof that he has fulfilled his promise to end the Iraq war. Winding down a conflict, however, entails far more than extracting troops.

In the case of Iraq, the American goal has been to leave a stable and representative government, avoid a power vacuum that neighboring states and terrorists could exploit and maintain sufficient influence so that Iraq would be a partner or, at a minimum, not an opponent in the Middle East.

But the Obama administration has fallen frustratingly short of some of those objectives.

The attempt by Mr. Obama and his senior aides to fashion an extraordinary power-sharing arrangement between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi never materialized. Neither did an agreement that would have kept a small American force in Iraq to train the Iraqi military and patrol the country’s skies. A plan to use American civilians to train the Iraqi police has been severely cut back. The result is an Iraq that is less stable domestically and less reliable internationally than the United States had envisioned.

The civil war in Syria was well under way by late 2011 yet the current situation (as described in the original Times story) seems to be a surprise to Team Obama:

A number of factors are helping the Qaeda affiliate. The terrorist group took advantage of the departure of American forces to rebuild its operations in Iraq and push into Syria. Now that it has established a strong foothold in Syria, it is in turn using its base there to send suicide bombers into Iraq at a rate of 30 to 40 a month, using them against Shiites but also against Sunnis who are reluctant to cede control.

Al Qaeda and other militants takes up residence at the border of weak and failed states? Who knew?

PILING ON: 'Priaire Weather' delivers the sort of progressive bleat I was expecting:

This action is not expected to have much effect. It's meant to be life-saving but, our military are saying, it's not likely to " reverse the sharp downturn in security" in Iraq. And it certainly suggests that we're doing this to preserve the idea that the Iraq invasion was justified rather than a serious misstep that set Iraq up for Muslim extremists.

Please - Obama's interest in vindicating the initial invasion is less than zero. Fortunately, Obama seems to be looking forward here rather than driving with his eyes locked on the rear-view mirror.

I don't know when those "birth pangs" of the Iraq democracy are finally going to end, but George W. Bush was probably right when he said we'll all be dead before we know how it comes out. Unfortunately, so will a lot of kids who deserved better.

December 24, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — With about a week left in the year, the Obama administration is backing away from a Dec. 31 deadline for securing a deal to keep American troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014, though it is standing by its warning that a total military withdrawal is still possible if delays continue, American and Afghan officials said.

The decision is a tacit acknowledgment of what has become obvious in both Kabul and Washington: Neither a hard sell nor soft persuasion has yet induced President Hamid Karzai to go along with the American-imposed timeline for the agreement.

It is also an embarrassing turn after weeks of threats by some senior administration officials, including Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, that a complete American withdrawal from Afghanistan — the so-called zero option — would be considered if Mr. Karzai did not sign the deal by the year’s end.

Instead of prompting Mr. Karzai to action, however, setting a boundary appears to have only reinforced his sense that American officials will back down if he refuses their demands — a lesson that has been repeated often over the past 12 years.

“I don’t know if I would call it bluffing,” said one American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “But it looks like that’s what we were doing, and now it looks like Karzai is calling us out.”

Dealing with this after the Afghan election next spring made sense anyway.

December 22, 2013

A regular metabolic compound that has been administered to mice has been shown to not just boost muscle function, but actually reverse the affects of aging. The research was led by David Sinclair of the University of New South Wales and the results have been published in the journal Cell.

...

A regular metabolic coenzyme known as nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) was administered to mice in hopes that it would slow the aging of skeletal muscle. The researchers were shocked to find that it didn’t slow aging; it dramatically reversed it. In under a week, the mice who had previously been suffering from a variety of age-related impairments experienced an increase in muscle tone, as if they had been exercising and following a healthy diet. In some regards, the compound acted like the proverbial fountain of youth.

So what is this "regular metabolic coenzyme" and how was it administered? From the paper, we glean this:

Here we evaluated whether similar effects could be achieved by increasing the supply of nicotinamide riboside (NR), a recently described natural NAD + precursor with the ability to increase NAD + levels, Sir2-dependent gene silencing, and replicative life span in yeast.

Their discussion includes this:

In conclusion, our work shows that NR is a powerful supplement to boost NAD+ levels, activate sirtuin signaling, and improve mitochondrial function, suggesting that this vitamin could be used to prevent and treat the mitochondrial decline that is a hallmark of many diseases associated with aging. Very recent work, showing that intraperitoneal administration of NMN could improve the metabolic damage induced by high-fat feeding (Yoshino et al., 2011), further supports this concept. To date, however, only NR has been identified as a naturally occurring component of the human diet (Bieganowski and Brenner, 2004).

Furthermore, NR protects against metabolic dysfunction at lower concentrations than those reported for NMN, and we proved that it is effective after oral administration when mixed with food, in contrast to NMN, which is injected intraperitoneally (Yoshino et al., 2011).

There is, however, a genuinely innovative ingredient that has the promise to deliver pronounced results without invasive procedures or significant expense. It is NIAGEN™ from ChromaDex (otcqb:CDXC), which was introduced this month as the first and only commercially available form of nicotinamide riboside. Also called NR, nicotinamide riboside is a metabolic booster found in milk and whey. Often referred to as a "miracle molecule", NR shows promise in research studies to help address many of the symptoms associated with aging and health care in general: obesity, cholesterol, muscle loss, energy decline, insulin sensitivity and more.

So that's what you want, but can you buy it? Yes and no. Swanson Helath Products offers it, but don't worry about Christmas delivery - it is currently on back order.

Well, I've made it this long; I should be good for a few more weeks. Which leaves time to read about other means of manipulating these things.

Fortunately ObamaCare covers mental health treatment. The Washington Monthly alerts us that 54 year old secretaries and 55 year old retired firefighters from New Hampshire are whining yuppies. Back when I was young, urban and professional "yuppie" stood for something. In fact, we stood for plenty. Changing times.

We looked at the Times coverage of the subsidy cliffs in ObamaCare yesterday.

Ginger Chapman and her husband, Doug, are sitting on the health care cliff.

The cheapest insurance plan they can find through the new federal marketplace in New Hampshire will cost their family of four about $1,000 a month, 12 percent of their annual income of around $100,000 and more than they have ever paid before.

Even more striking, for the Chapmans, is this fact: If they made just a few thousand dollars less a year — below $94,200 — their costs would be cut in half, because a family like theirs could qualify for federal subsidies.

I know what everyone is thinking. Everyone! Over at ThinkProgress, some progressive is frantically typing "$100,00! Suck it up and quit whining, you wealthy exploiters of the less privileged! Time to share!" [The Washington Monthly delivers, denouncing a 54 year old secretary and a 55 year old retired firefighter as whining yuppies; sue me.] For their benefit the Times includes this:

The Chapmans acknowledge that they are better off than many people...

And on the right, folks are wondering just what this couple does because in New England a fifty year old teacher married to a fifty year old cop could easily be clearing $100,000, despite an absence of private jets in their lifestyle and the presence of a middle class vibe. And that is not such a bad guess:

“We are just right over that line,” said Ms. Chapman, who is 54 and does administrative work for a small wealth management firm. Because their plan is being canceled, she is looking for new coverage for her family, which includes Mr. Chapman, 55, a retired fireman who works on a friend’s farm, and her two sons. “That’s an insane amount of money,” she said of their new premium. “How are you supposed to pay that?”

Doies she think the price is insane? Wait'll she learns it includes mental health coverage! And maternity care! That'll cheer her right up.

As to the absurd tax cliff embedded in ObamaCare, we discovered that ourselves back in October. At 400% of the poverty line (which varies by family size) the subsidies bring the net premium down to 9.5% of income. Earn a dollar more than that, and the whole subsidy goes away.

So lets plug the current example into the Kaiser Family Foundation subsidy calculator. With income of $94,200 the Chapmans (two New Hampshire adults aged 55 and 54; two kids; I guess all to be non-smokers with a ZIP code of 03060) would get a subsidy of $6,360 per year to bring the cost of a Silver plan down from $15,309 to $8,949 per year, which is 9.5% of their hypothetical annual income of $94,200.

But - hard luck! - they earn a bit more than that, so their subsidy is zero. $530 a month is a lot of money for most people, but she works for a hedge fund or something like it so as far as our friends on the left are concerned, screw her. And screw the retired firefighter, too.

Of course, Mickey Kaus notes that people may just figure how to enhance the finagling of their taxes; the payoff to under-reporting income in the middle brackets has gone way up, especially at the subsidy cliff. That is a win-win for the left, since Pikkety and Saez can then report a decline in middle-class incomes and Obama can fret some more about rising income inequality.

This situation reminds us of the absurd defense of the random ObamaCare redistributions offerred straightfacedly and heroically by Jonathan Cohn of TNR. His gist - all the redistribution comes from taxes on Mitt Romney's sons and the other rich. We all know why he chose to ignore the obvious redistribution fail covered today by the Times.

MORE: Using the Kaiser estimator an intrepid researcher can search for subsidy cliffs all over the country. Which the Times did!

An analysis by The New York Times shows the cost of premiums for people who just miss qualifying for subsidies varies widely across the country and rises rapidly for people in their 50s and 60s. In some places, prices can quickly approach 20 percent of a person’s income.

Experts consider health insurance unaffordable once it exceeds 10 percent of annual income. By that measure, a 50-year-old making $50,000 a year, or just above the qualifying limit for assistance, would find the cheapest available plan to be unaffordable in more than 170 counties around the country, ranging from Anchorage to Jackson, Miss.

A 60-year-old living in Polk County, in northwestern Wisconsin, and earning $50,000 a year, for example, would have to spend more than 19 percent of his income, or $9,801 annually, to buy one of the cheapest plans available there. A person earning $45,000 would qualify for subsidies and would pay about 5 percent of his income, or $2,228, for an inexpensive plan.

In Oklahoma City, a 60-year-old earning $50,000 could buy one of the cheapest plans for about 6.6 percent of his income, or about $3,279 a year with no subsidy. If he earned $45,000, with the benefit of a subsidy, he would spend about $2,425.

Remember - We had to pass live with the bill the current version of the bill as arbitrarily re-defined by Obama to see what's in it.

STILL MORE: In addition to the light comedy provided by the Washington Monthly (a 55 year old retired firefighter is a whining yuppie?) we see Dean Baker discovering that health care is expensive even if it is hidden by employer sponsorship. We await the day he discovers that rising health care costs are a big part of the stagnant wage story which so vexes the guardians of the middle class:

Experts note that employers focus on total compensation costs—that is, the combination of wages and benefits— so increases in health benefits will result in lower wage increases than would occur if health benefits did not increase. The Council of Economic Advisers reports that between 2000 and 2009, workers’ average total compensation (wages and benefits) grew by 1.3 percent per year (after adjusting for inflation).

The growth rate of premiums for employer-sponsored coverage was much faster, however, averaging 5.1 percent per year (after adjusting for inflation) during this period. As a result, the portion of workers’ total compensation going toward employer-sponsored health insurance premiums expanded from 7.4 percent in 2000 to 10.3 percent in 2009. The average wages workers received net of insurance premiums (that is, after subtracting the employees’ premiums) grew by only 0.7 percent per year (adjusted for inflation) between 2000 and 2009.

December 20, 2013

The Obama administration on Thursday night significantly relaxed the rules of the federal health-care law for millions of consumers whose individual insurance policies have been canceled, saying they can buy bare-bones plans or entirely avoid a requirement that most Americans have health coverage.

The surprise announcement, days before the Dec. 23 deadline for people to choose plans that will begin Jan. 1, triggered an immediate backlash from the health insurance industry and raised fairness questions about a law intended to promote affordable and comprehensive coverage on a widespread basis.

Most Americans have little sympathy for the insurers, who made their own bed by supporting Obamacare, but the unfairness issue is real and unavoidable. If your insurance was canceled and you dutifully struggled to sign up for coverage through Healthcare.gov, got smacked with sticker shock but paid for new gold-plated insurance, you apparently were a sucker. A whole group of people with canceled plans will get a nice, inexpensive plan just like what they had. Or consider: You were in the target audience for the “pajama boy” ad — a 20-something who didn’t really want insurance and would just as soon have spent the money on a down payment for a house. You toddled over to the screen, hot chocolate in hand, and spent a bunch of money on something you didn’t want. Now there are a bunch of people who get a much cheaper option– so why don’t you?

This is truly make-it-up-as-you-go-along time.

And:

Likewise, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor dashed out a statement: “Our entire health care system can’t be fundamentally changed at any given time subject to the random impulses of President Obama. How can anyone make health care decisions today knowing that the law may be unilaterally changed again tomorrow?” Indeed, the move is likely to impede further sign-ups in the exchanges, exactly the opposite of what the administration recognized was essential to the plan’s success. Cantor reminded voters, “Republicans have consistently asked for a one year delay of the mandates for all Americans, and put forward a proposal to allow American families to keep their health plans. The White House actions clearly prove ObamaCare can’t work as designed. It’s time for ObamaCare to be delayed for all.”

A&E, here, is dealing with one of the fundamentals of reality shows that aren't at the documentary end of the spectrum but are at the comedy end of the spectrum. On the one hand, it loves to sell the Robertsons as real, genuine, cinema beardite stars who simply can't stop keeee-razy things from coming out of their mouths. On the other, it would like to be in the position of a sitcom in saying, "Hey, we are as appalled by this actor as you are, but it doesn't have to have anything to do with the show, right?" (That, though, will offend an entirely different group of folks who would really rather see Real Phil and certainly think there's no reason to find him appalling.)

December 18, 2013

Peggy Noonan has a long rumnination on the basic competence of team Obama, noting that, like their boss, they have some experience and skill at communicating but not executing, and who could have seen that coming?

But the comic twist is this - rather than end the column at its conclusion, the web jockeys repeat the whole thing. Repeatring ideas for emphasis is a valuable rhetorical device, but this seems excessive, not to mention a valuable waste of pixels. One migh hope that a column on someone else's competence would be competently delivered, but the holidays are approaching and the B-team is taking over.

There is a conclusion, or at least an ending, in the middle there somewhere...

December 17, 2013

David Brooks delivers an hysterical column mocking "thought leaders". One presumes that some of this is autobiographical but I can only picture Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein as the leads. First, what is a thought leader?

Little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be philosophers. In Renaissance Florence they dreamed of becoming Humanists. But now a new phrase and a new intellectual paragon has emerged to command our admiration: The Thought Leader.

The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.

He doesn’t have students, but he does have clients. He doesn’t have dark nights of the soul, but his eyes blaze at the echo of the words “breakout session.”

And where do they come from?

In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. On campus he finds himself enmeshed in a new social contract: Young people provide their middle-aged professors with optimism and flattery, and the professors provide them with grade inflation. He is widely recognized for his concern for humanity. (He spends spring break unicycling across Thailand while reading to lepers.)

Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading.

Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark. There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status. Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?”

“I mean it really reminded me of — of a video that we saw of Saddam Hussein doing the same thing, having people plucked out of an audience and people sitting there sweating and nobody daring to move or do anything,” said Kerry, according to the transcript provided by ABC News. “Um, this is the nature of this ruthless, horrendous dictatorship and of his insecurities. And — and I think we — we need to factor that into the urgency of getting China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, all of us, uh, to stay on the same page and to put as much effort into the denuclearization as possible. To have a nuclear weapon, potentially, in the hands of somebody like Kim Jong In — Jun — just becomes even more unacceptable.”

First, I yield to no one in my low regard for John Kerry. However, in his own bumbling way, Kerry seems to be restating the US position on North Korea, which rejects accepting them as a nuclear state, and reprising a past intelligence assessment he offered while in Seoul last April:

Nuclear missile capability?Kerry addressed a report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, which was disclosed in a congressional hearing on Thursday, that said the agency has “moderate confidence” that North Korea is capable of mounting a nuclear weapon on a missile, but that such a weapon would likely not be reliable.

...

Kerry said Friday that while North Korea has tested a nuclear device, they have not yet shown the capability to build a weapon small enough to be mounted on a ballistic missile.

“It is inaccurate to suggest that the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea -- North Korea's official name] has fully tested, developed, and demonstrated capabilities that are articulated in that report,” Kerry said. “But obviously they have conducted a nuclear test so there is some kind of device. But that is very different from miniaturization and delivery and from tested delivery and other things. Does it get you closer to a line that is more dangerous? Yes.”

So the US position is that North Korea has nuclear devices which are probably not missile-ready but we want them to agree to roll back their programs. I am not sure Mr. Nuance quite burbled that out, but he is surely aware of their nuclear threat. And obviously, one of these devices may easily be small enough to be placed on a naval vessel, so worries about their possession of a nuclear "weapon" are not premature.

And what, by the way, is his point in making the Saddam Hussein comparison? Surely he is not hinting that the removal of Saddam had some beneficial consequences. Is he suggesting that the North Korean leader is awful but should be left in place indefinitely while we chat him up ineffectually? I can hardly imagine he is suggesting that a coalition of the willing might need to act. This is over ten years old but I doubt the mountains have moved in that time:

Seoul, with a population of 10 million, is so close to the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas that it is in range of thousands of North Korean artillery pieces. The possible chain reaction set off by an attack could have catastrophic consequences.

GREELEY, Colo. — When Sheriff John Cooke of Weld County explains in speeches why he is not enforcing the state’s new gun laws, he holds up two 30-round magazines. One, he says, he had before July 1, when the law banning the possession, sale or transfer of the large-capacity magazines went into effect. The other, he “maybe” obtained afterward.

He shuffles the magazines, which look identical, and then challenges the audience to tell the difference.

“How is a deputy or an officer supposed to know which is which?” he asks.

Colorado’s package of gun laws, enacted this year after mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., has been hailed as a victory by advocates of gun control. But if Sheriff Cooke and a majority of the other county sheriffs in Colorado offer any indication, the new laws — which mandate background checks for private gun transfers and outlaw magazines over 15 rounds — may prove nearly irrelevant across much of the state’s rural regions.

Yeah, yeah - my guess is that prosecutors will still use the magazine law as an add-on charge.

The story provoked a lovely brawl in the NY Times comments section. Most readers were outraged, obvi, but a few defiant ones noted that Obama is hardly above the same behavior. Obama's unilateral adoption of many elements of the DREAM Act comes to mind; from the Times:

Obama to Permit Young Migrants to Remain in U.S.

Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children will be allowed to remain in the country without fear of deportation and able to work, under an executive action the Obama administration announced on Friday.

...

For immigrants who come forward and qualify, Homeland Security authorities will use prosecutorial discretion to grant deferred action, a reprieve that will be valid for two years and will have to be renewed. Under current law, that status allows immigrants to apply for work permits.

In a memorandum issued Friday referring to the students, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano instructed all enforcement agents to “immediately exercise their discretion, on an individual basis, in order to prevent low-priority individuals from being placed into removal proceedings.”

December 15, 2013

FOR our age of wonks and white papers and warring experts, there ought to be a word — something just short of, though not shorter than, schadenfreude — for the gentle thrill inspired by a social-science finding that mildly unsettles one’s ideological opponents.

I’m thinking of the satisfied tingle a liberal might get from a study that suggests high taxes are good for economic growth. Or the spring added to a libertarian’s step by a report that environmental regulations hurt the poor.

Or the pleasure that I took recently from the headline: “Study: Having daughters makes parents more likely to be Republican.”

For many years, researchers found that women were happier than men, although recent studies contend that the gap has narrowed or may even have been reversed. Political junkies might be interested to learn that conservative women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy. That makes them slightly happier than conservative men and significantly happier than liberal women. The unhappiest of all are liberal men; only about a fifth consider themselves very happy.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Saturday that it had reduced the error rate in enrollment data sent to insurance companies under the new health care law, even as insurers said that files they received from the government in the last few days were riddled with mistakes.

The quality of the data is important; it could affect the ability of people to get medical care and prescription drugs when they go to doctors’ offices and pharmacies starting next month.

Really? You mean doctors and pharamcists and insurers actually need that info for billing purposes? What happened to exhortations to rely on the kindness of strangers?

MAybe an illustrative example would have helped First Reader grasp this. If I subscribe to the Times by way of their website but they don't communicate my home address correctly to the delivery team, the paper will end up in my neighbor's driveway and eventually find its way to their puppy rather than my parakeet, so where is the value added, hmm?

Well, Obama's staff won't be giving him the bad news, but maybe he will notice this tidbit in the Times.

Since the massacre at Newtown, Conn., Slate has scoured the Web for information on gun-related deaths and adding them to this interactive. As the months unfolded, it became clear that even though thousands of people were being added to our database, we were missing thousands more. Now that we’re hitting the one-year mark, the full extent of that deviation is clear: The CDC counts about 32,000 people killed with guns each year, while Slate’s database only has one-third of that. Why the huge discrepancy?

Earlier this month Slate launched an effort to categorize the gun deaths in our system. That effort verified the source of the discrepancy: suicides. We’ve missed nearly all gun-related suicides, because our information is based on media reports, and the media typically avoid reporting on suicides.

Our interactive reflects the picture the media paints of gun violence in America: One in which guns mostly kill homicide victims, with the occasional accidental death thrown in. But that’s immensely different than the reality of gun violence. In reality, two out of three gun deaths are suicides, not the one out of 10 our interactive suggests.

I can think of plenty of good reasons for the media not to report on suicides, but how could this be news to Slate?

Well, let me send them on their voyage of discovery with two additional insights. First, when hypingtheurgency of gun control and the perils of gun violence in America, the key figure is the 30,000 total of homicides and suicides. How could an assault weapons ban or a limit on magazine capacity impact the suicide rate, you ask? Don't ask - it's 30,000 deaths and maybe we are having a crisis of suicidal people shooting themselves sixteen times and bleeding out.

That said, some sort of mental health screening might well bring down the suicide rate [link-Israel experience]:

EK: As I understand it, there’s a stronger link between guns and suicide than between guns and homicide. And one of the really interesting parts of your paper is your recounting of the Israeli military’s effort to cut suicides among soldiers by restricting access to guns.

JR: Yes, it’s very striking. In Israel, it used to be that all soldiers would take the guns home with them. Now they have to leave them on base. Over the years they’ve done this -- it began, I think, in 2006 -- there’s been a 60 percent decrease in suicide on weekends among IDS soldiers. And it did not correspond to an increase in weekday suicide. People think suicide is an impulse that exists and builds. This shows that doesn’t happen. The impulse to suicide is transitory. Someone with access to a gun at that moment may commit suicide, but if not, they may not.

MORE: To be really fair, Ross Douthat was all over the suicide issue last January. By way of contrast, here is the NY Times Joe Nocera, who has been tracking gun control since Newton, keeping us current as of Saturday morning:

According to Slate’s gun tracker, as of Friday evening, there have been around 11,460 gun deaths in the year since the Newtown massacre.

I am trying to believe that he understands the difference between "homicide" and "suicide". I am also wondering why he is not troubled that the Slate death rate is nowhere near the 30,000 national figure we might have expected. The Times has covered the suicide angle [my reax] and Mr. Nocera has even mentioned it in his writing. This is a Times pundit who has been obsessing about gun violence for a year, and he is about to discover what the rest of us knew a year ago. I am not agog because this is business as usual among our pundits, but honestly...

Were you worried that ObamaCare was maxing out as a source of comedy gold? Hmm, not even a little worried? Well, fine, but here is some more Obama-induced hilarity anyway; today's cast of thousands is the creative upper crust of Manhattan, so you know they voted for this:

With Affordable Care Act, Canceled Policies for New York Professionals

Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.

They are part of an unusual informal health insurance system that has developed in New York in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce. That allowed them to avoid the sky-high rates in New York’s individual insurance market, historically among the most expensive in the country.

But those professional association plans were nixed by ObamaCare. Were the deductibles too high and the coverage too spotty? Au contraire, these people needed to share:

...many of the New York policies being canceled meet and often exceed the [ACA] standards, brokers say. The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable.

Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers “smaller and disproportionately sicker,” and would drive up rates.

That's right - solidarity! Which leads to vignettes such as this:

For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.

“I couldn’t sleep because of it,” said Barbara Meinwald, a solo practitioner lawyer in Manhattan.

Ms. Meinwald, 61, has been paying $10,000 a year for her insurance through the New York City Bar. A broker told her that a new temporary plan with fewer doctors would cost $5,000 more, after factoring in the cost of her medications.

Ms. Meinwald also looked on the state’s health insurance exchange. But she said she found that those plans did not have a good choice of doctors, and that it was hard to even find out who the doctors were, and which hospitals were covered. “It’s like you’re blindfolded and you’re told that you have to buy something,” she said.

That was after being blindfolded and asked to vote for someone.

Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.

“We are the Obama people,” said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists.

“I’m for it,” she said. “But what is the reality of it?”

"What is the reality?" asked the member of the reality-based community. Asking the tough questions a mere five years too late.

The Christmas season must be difficult for Times columnists. Apparently holiday fatigue and excess eggnog lead to bad outcomes. Any column bt Maureen Dowd could be offered as evidence but this latest laugher from David Brooks reveals a man in need of a few weeks away:

Strengthen the Presidency

Right, because libs were so content under Bush and righties are just loving Obama. Not to mention the civil liberties/NSA/drone wars thing that still vexes some on the left. But let's press on:

We’re in a period of reform stagnation. It’s possible that years will go by without the passage of a major piece of legislation. Meanwhile, Washington nearly strangles on a gnat, like this week’s teeny budget compromise.

In the current issue of The American Interest, Francis Fukuyama analyzes this institutional decay. His point is that the original system of checks and balances has morphed into a “vetocracy,” an unworkable machine where many interests can veto reform.

"Reform stagnation" - he says that like its a bad thing.

We learn - tear out the front page! - that the center of power has been captured by the regulatees:

Fukuyama describes what you might call the demotion of Pennsylvania Avenue. Legislative activity could once be understood by what happens at either end of that street. But now power is dispersed among the mass of rentier groups. Members of Congress lead lives they don’t want to lead because they are beholden to the groups. The president is hemmed in by this new industry, interest group capitalism. The unofficial pressure sector dominates the official governing sector. Throw in political polarization and you’ve got a recipe for a government that is more stultified, stagnant and overbearing.

He knows you are slack-jawed from thoughts of ObamaCare, but stay with him:

This is a good moment to advocate greater executive branch power because we’ve just seen a monumental example of executive branch incompetence: the botched Obamacare rollout. It’s important to advocate greater executive branch power in a chastened mood. It’s not that the executive branch is trustworthy; it’s just that we’re better off when the presidency is strong than we are when the rentier groups are strong, or when Congress, which is now completely captured by the rentier groups, is strong.

He still knows that some us are slack-jawed. What, we are wondering, about the Tea Party? We can read umpty-bump articles about how the tea Partiers have hijacked the Washington agenda, but just which rentier group has them in their pocket? And speaking of the Washington establishment and a massive lobbying effort, what about about immigration reform?

Mr. Brooks is ready with a riposte, at least on immigration:

Here are the advantages. First, it is possible to mobilize the executive branch to come to policy conclusion on something like immigration reform. It’s nearly impossible for Congress to lead us to a conclusion about anything.

Huh? That hardly explains why all the king's lobbyists and all the king's men can't get immigration reform through Congress.

We are offered a bit of wishful thinking:

Second, executive branch officials are more sheltered from the interest groups than Congressional officials. Third, executive branch officials usually have more specialized knowledge than staffers on Capitol Hill and longer historical memories. Fourth, Congressional deliberations, to the extent they exist at all, are rooted in rigid political frameworks. Some agencies, especially places like the Office of Management and Budget, are reasonably removed from excessive partisanship. Fifth, executive branch officials, if they were liberated from rigid Congressional strictures, would have more discretion to respond to their screw-ups, like the Obamacare implementation.

To be fair, by "executuve branch" I am sure he does not mean "White House"; the column opened with a visit to the Congressional Budget Office. However, the wishful thinking is in believing that the OMB should be more imortant because it is (somewhat) non-partisan. Here in reality, that reverses cause and effect - if it were important, the OMB would have been re-staffed. Sort of like the non-partisam Justice Department under Holder.

A full departure from reality occurs here:

Finally, the nation can take it out on a president’s party when a president’s laws don’t work. That doesn’t happen in Congressional elections, where most have safe seats.

Uh huh. Is Mr. Brooks even aware of the IRS/Tea Party scandal? Taking it out on an incumbent executive is not as easy as it ought to be. And Obamacare has never polled above 50%, yet we can't seem to escape it or its author.

He builds to his comic climax:

So how do you energize the executive? It’s a good idea to be tolerant of executive branch power grabs and to give agencies flexibility. We voters also need to change our voting criteria. It’s not enough to vote for somebody who agrees with your policy preferences. Presidential candidates need to answer two questions. How are you going to build a governing 60 percent majority that will enable you to drive the Washington policy process? What is your experience implementing policies through big organizations?

Thinking all the way back to 2000, I would say that Governor Bush, a "Uniter, not a Divider", answered both of those questions to the satisfaction of a near-majority. And pushed through much of his domestic and international agenda, garnering a nod from Mencken. That said, I don't remember thumbsuckers about the powerless presidency back when Bush's Social Security reform foundered in 2005, although I suppose his failed run at immigration reform may have generated some ruminations about lame ducks and unpopular wars.

Of course, in 2008 Obama seemed to have the answers to just those questions - the greatest thinker and speaker in the history of forever had 60 Senators on his side, an overwhelming House majority, and a nation behind him. Was the resulting Washington drift really a problem of partisanship and lobbying, or was it a center-right nation rejecting a lefty President who dropped his electoral disguise?

Or, as we have learned with HealthCare.fail, maybe the Lightworker is just a light worker.

It’s a rare rentier group that’s so powerful and malevolent that holding it in check is worth gifting new powers to an already increasingly powerful presidency. (Watch Jonathan Turley on that if you haven’t already.) But it’s also typical of the “banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry,” of which Brooks is a leading practitioner, that the idea of gridlock horrifies him more than extending the imbalance of power among the three branches. If only we acquiesced in Obama’s power grabs more than we already do — and we already do, almost entirely! — he might enact immigration reform himself. Which is important because if we’re stuck waiting for John Boehner and the House to do it, we might be waiting … what? Another four, maybe five months? Seems to me if you’re worried about special interests capturing government, you’re better off empowering Congress so that those interests hold each other in check to some extent than you are empowering a single government official who’ll end up serving the particular interests that have captured him.

Is it the sweet flavor that our taste buds are after? Or the smooth and creamy texture? Or perhaps it is the copious blend of fat and sugar?

An intriguing new study suggests that what really draws people to such treats, and prompts them to eat much more than perhaps they know they should, is not the fat that they contain, but primarily the sugar.

The new research tracked brain activity in more than 100 high school students as they drank chocolate-flavored milkshakes that were identical in calories but either high in sugar and low in fat, or vice versa. While both kinds of shakes lit up pleasure centers in the brain, those that were high in sugar did so far more effectively, firing up a food-reward network that plays a role in compulsive eating.

To their surprise, the researchers found that sugar was so powerful a stimulus that it overshadowed fat, even when the two were combined in large amounts. High sugar shakes that were low in fat ramped up the reward circuitry just as strongly as the more decadent shakes that paired sugar and fat in large quantities, suggesting that fat was a runner-up to sugar, said Eric Stice, the lead author of the study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“We do a lot of work on the prevention of obesity, and what is really clear not only from this study but from the broader literature over all is that the more sugar you eat, the more you want to consume it,” said Dr. Stice, a senior research scientist at the Oregon Research Institute. “As far as the ability to engage brain reward regions and drive compulsive intake, sugar seems to be doing a much better job than fat.”

Next up - toast with butter versus toast with jam.

As asides - marijuana is one thing, but this Dutch health official wants to regulate sugar as a drug. And I had all sorts of thoughts on the revenue potential and the nanny-state approach back in the day.

The voting page currently has the Shriners Hospital for Children in first place with 32,147 votes. That is a long way from Americares, currently in 8th place with 2,342 votes. However, a big move up is possible! Fourth place is held with 4,859 votes so cracking the top five should be doable. Voting is quick and will be a breeze for anyone who has made it past the Typepad comment impediment.

My understanding is that the voting is limited to one vote per machine per day. Thanks very much.

The NY Times reports on one of the many obvious yet "unexpected" consequences of ObamaCare - small employers are realizing that it makes no sense to offer employee health coverage:

Dropping Health Plans, to Pick Better Coverage

By STACY COWLEY

For nearly 20 years, Keith Perkins offered health insurance to employees of his small electrical contracting company in Greencastle, Pa., and footed most of the bill. This year, with the arrival of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplace, he decided to stop.

Mr. Perkins, who is 54, did the math and calculated that most of his employees, who are spread across Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, would come out ahead if he dropped his group policy and let them buy insurance individually through the new federal and state exchanges.

He knew the move would be unpopular with some employees, but he was tired of trying to choose one plan every year to cover all of their diverse needs.

“Some of my guys are on the lower end of the wage scale,” said Mr. Perkins, who typically has 10 to 18 employees. “When I did the subsidy calculator, I realized many of them would actually be better off if we didn’t offer coverage. We took the amount of money we were paying for health insurance and dumped it into their paychecks instead. And this way, they get to make the choice, not me.”

No kidding. Employer-sponsored health insurance was a consequence of government regulation (WWII wage controls overlooked fringe benefits such as insurance) and has remained alive due to its tax advantage (employees get coverage with pre-tax dollars). Changing the regulations and financial incentives changes behavior - who knew?

A better question would be, who didn'tknow, other than Obama? And now that the Times has written about it, maybe Obama knows too.

The Times gets in the trenches with some live anecdotes:

Kelly Fristoe, an insurance broker in Wichita Falls, Tex., estimates that the employees at nearly half of his small-group clients would be better off if the companies dropped their coverage, gave some of the savings directly to the workers and let them shop for their own insurance. Four clients have already decided to do that for 2014.

Steve Hooper, president of the Health Economics Group, a Rochester, N.Y., company that manages corporate benefit plans, said many of the workers in his region, including most of his own employees, have incomes low enough to qualify for the federal subsidies available to those who earn up to four times the federal poverty level, about $46,000 annually.

“We have a lot of part-time people and single moms with kids,” Mr. Hooper said. “The New York exchange offers some tremendous options for them that are better than anything else out there.”

A self-described data fanatic, Mr. Hooper, 74, spent months studying the law’s nuances and exploring various situations for his 25-person business. He knew what he paid his employees, but he did not know their overall household incomes. So he created a staff survey and arranged meetings with his employees to discuss their individual situations.

It became clear that many, especially those with children, would be better off without the option of buying company-sponsored insurance. Employees who have access to an “affordable” employer plan can buy a plan instead through the exchanges if they choose, but they cannot collect any subsidy that they would otherwise be eligible for. And those with children face an extra pitfall: The law’s calculation of “affordable” does not take into account the cost of adding dependents to the employer’s plan.

In 2013, to insure 11 workers, Mr. Hooper’s company contributed $283 a month for each employee toward health care premiums, covering more than 80 percent of the cost for an individual. Employees paid an additional $55 a month, or more if they needed coverage for dependents. For 2014, Mr. Hooper is taking the $30,000 to $40,000 he will save by canceling the group’s plan and using it to fund flexible spending accounts for each employee.

So far, he said, only one person is facing higher premiums, and he plans to add extra money to her flexible spending account to fill the gap. And while his company’s old plan carried a $2,500 annual deductible, he said the typical deductibles on his employees’ new plans range from zero, for those who qualify for Medicaid, to $2,000.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers don't work if the employees are highly paid:

Paul Hamborg isn’t sure. Mr. Hamborg is trying to decide whether his company, Enrollment Research, a consulting firm based in San Antonio, should renew its group insurance in 2014. None of the company’s five employees would qualify for subsidies individually, and he is weighing the advantages of switching to individual coverage — more choice for his employees, less administrative overhead for him — against the increased tax bills for them. That issue, said Mr. Hamborg, who is 40, “is the one thing about the Affordable Care Act that’s a real disappointment, from my standpoint.”

CBO:Top 40% Paid 106.2% of Income Taxes; Bottom 40% Paid -9.1%, Got Average of $18,950 in 'Transfers' - See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/cbotop-40-paid-1062-income-taxes-bottom-40-paid-91-got-average-18950#sthash.Pv2zdnnG.dpuf

(CNSNews.com) - The top 40 percent of households by before-tax income actually paid 106.2 percent of the nation’s net income taxes in 2010, according to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office. - See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/cbotop-40-paid-1062-income-taxes-bottom-40-paid-91-got-average-18950#sthash.Pv2zdnnG.dpuf

(CNSNews.com) - The top 40 percent of households by before-tax income actually paid 106.2 percent of the nation’s net income taxes in 2010, according to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office.

Normally these CBO studies look at that total tax burden by quintile and include Social Security and Medicare taxes, and they do that here as well. Folks willing to focus exclusively on the income tax can probably find the data supporting the CNS story. FWIW, the 'transfers' mentionned in the story are primarily Social Security and Medicare.

People in the lower quintiles have a low but positive total tax rate.

And we learn this about transfers (p 10 of 36 .pdf):

Government transfers increase income in all groups, but those increases, both in dollars and as a percentage of market income, are larger for groups with lower market income. Social Security and Medicare are the two largest transfer programs. Combined benefits from those programs averaged $8,900 for all households in 2010, and other transfers averaged $4,100.

Social Security and Medicare go predominantly to elderly households, many of which have low market income. Households in the lowest quintile received 36.2 percent of the total benefits from Social Security and Medicare (averaging $14,200 per household),...

Frank Bruni, NY Times columnist, inadvertently illustrates the difficulty of staying on script when employed by the Obama Press Office. Here he is with an interesting column that, superficially, is a movie review that has nothing to do with politics:

Joaquin Phoenix stars as a man in love with the operating system for his smartphone-esque device, a sexy Siri that — or should I say who? — tells him not only when he has mail but what a terrific male he is, and does this in Scarlett Johansson’s come-hither coo. There was much fuss recently over the decision that Johansson was ineligible for the Golden Globes: Should a disembodied voice’s contribution be regarded as any less real than a visible, palpable person’s? The debate echoed questions in the movie itself, which was written and directed by Spike Jonze and was just named the best picture of 2013 by both the National Board of Review and (in a tie with “Gravity”) the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

OK. But the real drama (OK, comedy) is here:

It’s a parable of narcissism in the digital world, which lets you sprint to the foreground of everything, giving you an audience or the illusion of one. To monitor Facebook or Twitter right after Nelson Mandela’s death last week was to be struck by how many people weren’t so much passing along the news as laying claim to it: Here’s what I thought of him. Here’s when I intersected with him. Here’s the personal reverberation.

And his gist: most of the giovernment funding is in the form of higher taxes on high earners (the new Medicare tax), fees on the health services industry, and reduced payments to health providers. So relax, everyone, ObamaCare is socking it to the oppressors!

I know what you're thinking - what about the stories about higher premiums, higher deductibles, and smaller networks? If newly-cancelled enrollees pay a higher premium (with a higher deductible), that does not show up as either a Federal tax or expenditure, although it does subsidize those with pre-existing conditions.

And what about all the stories about the importance of the 'Young Invincibles' who are expected to overpay for insurance to subsidize the rest of us (and who, despite the individual mandate, may become the Young Invisibles at enrollment time)? That also occurs outside Cohn's framework of government expenditures and receipts, but it is clearly important, so how did he manage to ignore it?

Cohn ignores the elephant by pretending everyone else is, too. He opens by excerpting this from a recent discussion on Fox News:

Republicans and their allies are making a lot of different arguments about what Obamacare is doing to America. It’s hiking premiums! It’s making people lose their doctors! It’s destroying Medicare! But if you listen closely, you’ll discern a common theme—a message aimed squarely at the middle class: Obamacare is taking away your money or health insurance, and giving it to somebody else. "If you think about it, it's $250 billion a year in Medicaid expansion, in the subsidy structure, that's basically being paid for by people on Medicare, through Medicare cuts, and a lot of tax increases," James Capretta, a former Bush Administration official now at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, said on Fox News Sunday. "It is a massive, massive income redistribution."

So since Capretta was ostensibly talking taxes, Cohn talked taxes. But link followers will find that taxes were a bit of an afterthought in the redistribution portion of the discussion. The moderator's intro was crystal clear:

WALLACE: All right. And that brings me to the final point I want to discuss here, and that is this question of whether or not ObamaCare has massive income redistribution.

Neera [president of the Center for American Progress], is it not the case that younger, healthier people are going to pay more than they currently do -- you got to let me ask the question.

Gee, that was not about taxes. Eventually Capretta was bnrought into the discussion:

WALLACE: Jim, is that a better deal or -- final word, is it a better deal or not?

CAPRETTA: Much worse deal. People today, if they're young and healthy can get relatively inexpensive insurance in the open individual market.

You're right about income redistribution, though. If you think about it, it's $250 billion a year in Medicaid expansion, in the subsidy structure, that's basically being paid for by people on Medicare, through Medicare cuts, and a lot of tax increases.

If you want to know what the bill is really about, people in their most honest and candid moments will admit that it's basically taken $250 billion a year out of taxes and Medicare and moving it into the Medicaid expansion and the subsidy structure. This other premium subsidies are also occurring between young and the old. But it is a massive, massive income redistribution.

So Capretta supplemented the 'young v old' argument with the point that Medicare is being cut for all, including the non-wealthy, and taxes are going up.

In response, Cohn decided his better rhetorical ploy would be to ignore the main point being made by the redistribution critics and press on, hoping no one would notice. Or more likely, figuring that even if people noticed, at least the left would have some new talking points around which to rally (Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly plays along uncritically, as does Paul Waldman at TAP). That is, if "tax the rich" can be considered a new talking point.

SOOOO YESTERDAY... The NY Times covered the controversial redistributive nature of ObamaCare a few weeks back, before lefties realized that they needed to rally around the rebuttal of a strawman argument:

Hiding in plain sight behind that pledge — visible to health policy experts but not the general public — was the redistribution required to extend health coverage to those who had been either locked out or priced out of the market.

Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.

The law, for example, banned rate discrimination against women, which insurance companies called “gender rating” to account for their higher health costs. But that raised the relative burden borne by men. The law also limited how much more insurers can charge older Americans, who use more health care over all. But that raised the relative burden on younger people.

And the law required insurers to offer coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions, which eased costs for less healthy people but raised prices for others who had been charged lower rates because of their good health.

December 09, 2013

TIME tries to drum up interest for its annual Man of the Year snoozer by releasing a short list of ten finalists. Get ready for this surprise - Obama made the short list, so there is still some love.

Some of the names are only here to attempt to resuscitate TIME amongst a younger demographic. Miley Cyrus? C'mon, "twerk" couldn't even get it done as word of the year.

And some of these other pics are meant to either assure TIME readers that this is a Very Serious Publication or to address the national health care crisis by putting a notable fraction of the population into a coma. "Bashar Assad, President of Syria"? Nobody wants to talk about Syria, especially cheerleaders for Barry.

The winner ought to be Edward Snowden. But as a dark horse, bet on Edith Windsor. No, I have no idea, but her claim to fame is "gay rights activist" so I'm sure this will make for a fashionable, comfortable lefty feel-good story.

That leaves Edith Windsor, Ted Cruz, and Edward Snowden. I think Edith Windsor is most likely, because: 1. She gives Time a chance to pick an individual woman, something they've done — embarrassing! — only once before. (It was Corazon C. Aquino, in 1986.) 2. She's a good figurehead for same-sex marriage and gay rights, which were very big this year. 3. It lets Time vary the usual focus on politics, economics, and foreign affairs.

There's Ted. Dear sweet, crazy, everyone-hates-him Ted. If Time is smelling blood and wants to punch around a conservative, the man to pick on is definitely Ted Cruz.

Edward Snowden is an interesting choice, but I don't think it helps Obama to create an occasion for everyone to focus on the NSA problem. Yeah, it's a distraction from healthcare.gov, but does Obama want help in that form? This is a 4th reason to go with Edith Windsor: Gay marriage is a subject that casts a flattering light on Obama.

So we have a winner, don't you think? Edith Windsor.

Interesting. If TIME has gone this long without a solo woman, maybe they will save the honor for Hillarity!.

Nuts are a great snack, says Jane Brody of the Times, and she manages to address some diet myths as well:

I know what you’re thinking: Aren’t nuts fattening? Yes, an ounce of nuts has 160 to 200 calories, nearly 80 percent from fat.

But in study after study, the more often people ate nuts, the leaner they tended to be.

For example, in a Mediterranean study that tracked the effect of nut consumption on weight gain over the course of 28 months, frequent nut consumers gained less weight than those who never ate nuts, and were 43 percent less likely to become overweight or obese.

How is that possible? First, nuts may be taking the place of other high-calorie snacks, like chips, cookies and candy. And nut eaters may be less likely to snack, period; the fat, fiber and protein in nuts suppresses hunger between meals.

Second, the body may treat calories from nuts differently from those in other high-carbohydrate foods. Third, nut eaters may pursue a healthier lifestyle and burn more calories through exercise.

December 08, 2013

Ohio State is generous enough to give America what it wants, which is a look at Auburn in the BCS title game. Which used to be played at New Year's day but under the new schedule seems to arrive after Valentine's Day.

December 06, 2013

The latest Gallup Poll on ObamaCare does not reveal any seismic shifts in public opinion about expanding/shrinking/repealing the law since the laughable Heathcare.Fail rollout rollover.

20% now favor expanding the law, up from 14% in early October; I imagine these are frustrated libs who want to end the suspense and move to single payer. The ranks of the "expand" seem to have come from the "Leave As Is" crowd, which has shrunk from 24% to 17%. "Scale it back" has risen from 20% to 21%; "Repeal" has moved from 29% to 32%. Without checking I'll guess that neither move achieves statistical significance. And the always admirable "No Opinion" bounced from 13% to 11%.

December 05, 2013

A white woman alleges that a black man raped her; he claims the sex was consensual. What's a prosecutor to do? And what are Earnest Libs to do? Confounding the picking of sides - the black man is part of the Big Football complex.

The police reports are here; the victim's race is mentioned in statements by two friends of the defendant (e.g., p 85 of the .pdf).

My two cents - this was not a case that could have been won.

Let me supplement this bit of the Times' "reporting":

The woman told the police she was raped at an apartment after a night of drinking at a bar near campus, according to a search warrant released hours before Meggs’s announcement. She said she was with friends and had five to six shots at a local bar and that her “memory is very broken from that point forward.” She told the police that she had taken a cab with a “nondescript” black man to an apartment where she was raped. She did not identify that man as Winston until about a month after she reported the assault.

She tried to fight the man off, and at some point, another man intervened and told him to stop, according to the warrant. But the two went into a bathroom “where he completed the act.” She had no idea where the assault took place, she said, but recalls riding on a scooter and being dropped off at a campus intersection.

The mystery man who intervened was Chris Casher, a roomate of Jameis Winston. He submitted an affidavit to the police and was eventually interviewed by one of them (p. 84-5). His gist - the woman had been hitting on football players at the bar (he had gotten her number), was sober in the cab, and was engaging in consensual sex with James. Casher burst in as a prank, and to determine her interest in a threesome. The two then moved into the bathroom because that door locked so there was a bit more privacy.

Maybe its all lies. Of course, the prosecutor also had a problem with her blood alcohol level being at 0.048%, which is well below the threshold for drunk driving. And the drug tests came back negative. One police report indicated that the victim alleged a date-rape drug may have been involved, but that did not pan out (p. 54):

[Redacted] informed me that while walking through the bar a male (unknown to her) handed her a shot. After she consumed the shot she stated she couldn't remember what happen next.

The family of the victim requested that the blood and urine be re-tested, but those results were the same. Baffling.

UPDATE: Good summary at the Bleacher Report, but I didn't notice a mention of the low BAC.

Anyone looking for an example of poor health science conflating correlation and causation should check out this laugher in the Times:

Why a Brisk Walk Is Better

Walking, fast or slow, is wonderful exercise. But now a first-of-its-kind study shows that to get the most health benefits from walking, many of us need to pick up the pace.

Evetually we learn that people who tend to walk slower while exercising are also more likely to die sooner. As to distinguishing cause and effect, both the study author and the Times reporter (Gretchen Reynolds, who surely knows better) eventually identify the screamingly obvious flaw in the headlined "logic". But the headline and lead were catchy, so here we are.

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which functions as a sort of law firm for the president and provides him and executive branch agencies with authoritative legal advice, formally weighed in on the platinum coin option sometime since Obama took office, according to OLC's recent response to HuffPost's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. While the letter acknowledged the existence of memos on the platinum coin option, OLC officials determined they were "not appropriate for discretionary release."

(k) The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary's discretion, may prescribe from time to time.

Matt Yglesias provided a lovely example of the sort of ignorance at work. What he didn't realize is that the concept of a "bullion coin" has a clear meaning in the nummismatic world. Let's cut to the US Mint:

A bullion coin is a coin that is valued by its weight in a specific precious metal. Unlike commemorative or numismatic coins valued by limited mintage, rarity, condition and age, bullion coins are purchased by investors seeking a simple and tangible means to own and invest in the gold, silver, and platinum markets.

So the Mint sells one ounce gold coins worth (roughly) $1,200 dollars with a face value of $50, but not the opposite. That would be an example of a bullion coin, which is what the statute authorized. Matt was having a 'har de har' about the ninnies at Fox News who thought that a trillion dollar platinum bullion coin would actually need to have a trillion dollars worth of platinum; if words have meaning, they were right.

Ahh, but what about the coins jingling in your pocket? Surely their value as molten metal is less than their value as a coin? No doubt; the excess value is known as "seignorage", and Matt was helpful enough to illustrate the ignorance at work there as well, with this headlined claim:

The Platinum Coin Was Intended To Generate Seigniorage

Wrong again, but thanks for playing! The US Mint makes 'seignorage' profits on the circulating coins it distributes to banks. It makes the same sort of manufacturing profits GM or Apple makes when it competes in the global market for bullion coins by offering gold, silver, and platinum coins at a cost-competitive basis. I hope Matt does not believe that when the US Mint converts an ounce of gold into a $50 American Eagle and sells it for $1500 that there is a seignorage profit. Let's see what the Mint says about their platinum coin:

All American Eagles are legal tender coins, with their face value imprinted in U.S. dollars. Although their face value is largely symbolic, it provides proof of their authenticity as official U.S. coinage. The one-ounce platinum coin displays the highest face value ($100) ever to appear on a U.S. coin.

With platinum near $1,400 an ounce there is no seignorage there (OK, "largely symbolic" as a description of the $100 face amount works a a clue, too).

So if the Mint can't issue a trillion dollar platinum bullion coin without that much platinum, can it offer a "proof platinum coin"? Conventional usage would say not - a "proof" coin is a specially produced version of a coin that is also made by conventional minting techniques. The notion of a "proof" version of a bullion coin that could not exist in conventional form is meaningless. So unless the Mint if prepared to produce a beautifully struck coin with a trillion dollars worth of platinum in it, the "proof" alternative is excluded.

I would love to see the OLC memo, mainly to see whether they actually use a phrase such as "cranial-anal impaction". And of course, the Fed's lawyers would have to sign off on this before they cut the trillion dollar check, and that would never happen - the idea of the Fed risking its independence and alienating Congress forever by participating in this sort of Executive Branch end-run seems to ignore the history of the central bank in this country.

My strong suspicion is that Prof. Tribe did roughly as much homewrk as Matt, slid the phrase "bullion coin" as meaningless static, and pressed on.

December 03, 2013

The WaPo reports on problems with the back-end of PotemkinCare. Hey, people thought they had a whiz-bang experience at HealthCare.Fail and only later learned that none of their sign-up info was accurately transmitted to the insurance companies? Obama will blame the evil insurers and hope the falling of the political chips can be managed. I agree with Megan - this is just a battle for survival.

December 01, 2013

We have something else for which to be thankful this weekend - Team Obama claims to have won their recent battle against HealthCare.fail:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said on Sunday that it had met its goal for improving HealthCare.gov so that the website now “will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.”

In effect, the administration gave itself a passing grade. Because of hundreds of software fixes and hardware upgrades in the past month, it said, the website — the main channel for people seeking to buy insurance under President Obama’s health care law — is now working more than 90 percent of the time, up from 40 percent during some weeks in October.

Jeffrey D. Zients, the Obama adviser leading the website repair effort, said consumers were having a much better experience now than in early October. Pages on the website load faster — in less than a second — compared with an average of eight seconds in late October, Mr. Zients said. “The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity, with greatly improved performance,” he said.

Left unanswered - whom do they imagine they are kidding? Reality will overtake their BS quite quickly, and the legacy media seems to have put down the pom-poms and embraced the notion that there is a real problem here. The Times has a breathless (and endless) account of the race to save Obama and ObamaCare that includes this detail:

As the political debate raged on an hour away in Washington last week, the small group of technical experts that Mr. Zients assembled in Maryland focused on a singular task: identifying and fixing the hundreds of software and hardware malfunctions that were bringing down the site and making it inaccessible.

At the outset, the team had made what officials call a very intentional decision to focus their repair effort on making HealthCare.gov work better for consumers. That has meant putting off some “back-end” fixes for insurers, who use the site to receive applications and bill the government for subsidy payments.

So it may look pretty, but does it work?

Other people working on the project, speaking anonymously because they are not authorized to talk to reporters, say significant challenges remain.

...

But perhaps most important, it remains unclear whether the enrollment data being transmitted to insurers is completely accurate. In a worst-case scenario, insurance executives fear that some people may not actually get enrolled in the plans they think they have chosen, or that some people may receive wrong information about the subsidies for which they are eligible.

If I go to Amazon and have a whiz-bang, state-of-the art experience at their website but three weeks later the items I ordered have not been delivered and my credit card has been billed for the wrong amount, did the website work? Tough question...

And speaking of tough questions, in their thousands of words of reporting on the battle to fix HealthCare.fail the Times never does get around to resolving the very question that apparently eluded Barack for three years - who was in charge of this operation and what did the organizational chart look like? Their exhaustive coverage contributes to the cover-up, as they generate the haystack in which the needle remains hidden.

THE LEFT HAND DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE FAR LEFT HAND IS DOING:

Progressives blanch and coffee exits nostrils throughout the Upper West Side with this tidbit:

After Mr. Zients arrived, he and Mr. Slavitt moved the technical guts of the rescue operation to QSSI in Columbia, Md. The war room — a command center known internally as the Exchange Operation Center, or X.O.C. — takes up the fourth floor of a nondescript office building that sits next to a shopping mall, close enough for frequent food runs to Chick-fil-A or Five Guys Burgers and Fries. The fix would happen here or not at all.